Fishing

By Wayne Brown


"Masterpiece photograph highly detailed 
couple dancing 
in a field of glittering butterflies and dragonflies."
Created by DALL-E3 Generative AI 

AI implements social memory through a massive source of words and pictures. This includes many concepts that we would regard as abstract, such as "masterpiece" and "detailed". In my six-word prompt, I didn't ask for a man and woman - just a "couple". Why is this picture so beautiful? Where does that beauty come from? The answer is: "social memory". In a subsequent post, I sketch out the details of the calculation that produces this result, but I'd like to let you know where I'm going with the idea before pulling back the curtain to sketch how the magic works.

Beauty is ultimately a judgement individual humans make of their experience. The "AI" computes staggering complexity but does not "understand" beauty. It is like a cuckoo clock that does not know "why" it strikes noon. The AI has no "experience" of its own.

My prompt as a fishing line baited by a few tasty words dipped into human ideas hungry for relevance. We, society, create the "sea." We learn to "fish" through language and the human experience itself.









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